Gordon & MacPhail has stood on South Street since 1895, when James Gordon and John Alexander MacPhail opened it as grocers and wine and spirit merchants, promising "a superior article at a popular price." It now bottles more than 300 expressions of single malt from distilleries across Scotland and is generally reckoned the world's leading specialist in the stuff. John Urquhart joined as an apprentice in 1896, and the Urquhart family still runs the firm from the same premises.
That is a lot of continuity for one street. The town around it is the largest in Moray, set on the River Lossie about five miles inland from the coast, on some of the driest and sunniest farmland in Scotland.
The Muckle Cross is the Wetherspoon, named after the market cross that once stood at the town's heart, and it takes "Elgin's Best Pub" on Tripadvisor with some regularity. Eight handpumps, national and Scottish micro-breweries, often a beer from Windswept up the road in Lossiemouth, and malt whiskies from more than twenty local distilleries. Two beer festivals a year, one Scottish and one World. It gets very busy at weekends.
The Mansefield does local North Sea seafood, Prime Aberdeen Angus beef and game from local estates, with oil paintings on the walls; starters around £7, mains around £17. The Sunninghill, a renovated Victorian villa, sits third among the town's restaurants on Tripadvisor.
For food to take home, JC Dawson has been butchering in Elgin since 1889 and in its current premises since 1932 — fourth generation, with Diamond Awards for its burgers and steak burgers and nineteen other awards besides. Allarburn Farm Shop runs a well-stocked deli on the farm-gate-to-plate principle.
On the banks of the Lossie at Newmill, Johnstons of Elgin has spun cashmere and wool since 1797. It is the last vertical woollen mill in Scotland, the only one taking raw cashmere to finished cloth on a single site. Free guided tours, a mill shop, a coffee shop.
Cooper Park runs along the river with a boating pond, a rose garden beside the tennis courts, and the walled Biblical Garden — three acres laid out in the shape of a Celtic cross, planted with the trees named in the Bible and dotted with sculpted figures like Samson and Joseph. Open May to September. The circular Cooper Park walk takes in the cathedral ruins on the way round.
The cathedral is why people photograph Elgin. Established in 1224 and once the second-largest in Scotland, it was known as the Lantern of the North. Alexander Stewart, the Wolf of Badenoch, burned it in 1390 after his excommunication. The two west towers still stand and can be climbed, and the octagonal chapter house — the only one of its kind in Scotland — carries its vaulted roof on a single central pillar.
The station sits in the town centre, shared by buses and trains, on the Aberdeen–Inverness line and the A96 that runs between those two cities. Lossiemouth and its two beaches are five miles north; Pluscarden Abbey, where Benedictine monks still live, about six to the southwest.
William Marshall, factor to the Gordon estate, wrote 257 fiddle tunes in whatever time the job left him, built clocks and watched the stars. Burns called him the first composer of Strathspeys of the age.
